Backyard Circus (published 1967, acquired circa 1980)

In which I reconsider the meaning of a well-trod childhood story

As a little kid my favorite book was called Backyard Circus. I made my mother read it to me enough times that I knew if she’d skipped a sentence or even swapped one word for another. In the story, a young boy goes to the circus with his family and is so enamored of the experience he immediately vows to recreate it at home. He enlists his friends, and his siblings—even the pets!—and after a long day of work they put on an elaborate show for the neighborhood adults.

It’s not a very interesting story, even by the standards of those old Rand McNally picture books. I wonder, actually, how it came into our possession in the first place, since its 1967 publication date would have been a bit late for my mother’s childhood—she was 16 then—but too early for my own. Maybe we picked it up at a library sale. When I was little we spent a lot of time at the library, my mom putting me on the back of her bike and pedaling us there, then letting me check out as many books as we could carry in the basket.

I suppose one could argue that there’s an interesting meta-fictional element to the story, this young kid using his creativity to invent an entire world. And maybe that’s what I liked about it. But it seems more likely, as a kid who by the age of four had lived in three different cities, that I envied the book’s main character, who knew everyone in the neighborhood well enough to bend them to his will.

I tried several times to create my own backyard circus. It would always start out ok, but the neighborhood kids would eventually get bored and wander off, before we could see the project through. The day would always end in the same way, with my mom trying to console me while I cried in bed.

It feels important to note that this is one of those stories I have no actual memory of: it exists to me only as a story. But it was told to me enough times that it feels like a memory. And I’ve told it enough times over the years—to friends, to dates, to random people at parties—that it feels like a central part of the Mike Ingram canon, one of those anecdotes that’s meant to explain something important about myself. Though recently I’ve begun to suspect I’ve been wrong all these years about what it means.

Last winter, my partner and I had a fight that was bad enough for me to get into our car and drive to the Jersey Shore, a little over an hour away. I don’t remember what the fight was about, though like most couples, I suspect, all out fights are about the same two or three things, only dressed up in varying costumes. In the car I listened to music and sat with my feelings until gradually they shrunk enough for me to get my arms around them. When I got to the shore I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, so I turned around and came back.

I may not remember the details of those backyard failures, but I remember the feeling that led me up to my room in tears. A rush of heat that starts in your chest and goes all the way out to your limbs. A jumble in your head, like you can’t sort all the things you’re thinking and feeling into their appropriate boxes. Later, after I’d calmed down, I’d be embarrassed for having overreacted, for having lost control of myself.

When I got into my car and drove to the shore, it was in part to avoid saying something I’d regret. But it was also about feeling suddenly overwhelmed, and needing to be somewhere quiet, by myself. Other times I’ve gone up to my study and shut the door, or gone for a walk, or driven across the river to a South Jersey driving range, where I can whack golf balls into a lake until I can see a path back to calm. Sometimes I think my partner would prefer me to yell, to have it out, rather than to disappear or go silent. But just like when I was a little kid, I hate that feeling of losing control, of unraveling. It feels embarrassing to do it in front of another person, even if that person is the person you plan to spend the rest of your life with.

For years, I’ve thought of my Backyard Circus story as being about a perpetually disappointed idealist, a kind of Charlie Brown figure who, each time Lucy holds the ball and promises to let him kick it, musters up enough faith—in her, in the world—to believe that this time she’s telling the truth. There’s a wistful, romantic quality to that version of the story. But I’ve come to think the story is actually about someone with an outsized need for control, someone who too often tries to stage-manage their own life and gets upset when the people around him don’t stick to the script—even when they didn’t know there was a script in the first place.

In other words: did those neighborhood kids get bored and bail, or did they get tired of me—my bossiness; my insistence that we do things the way the kids in the book did them—and eventually give up, shaking their heads as they walked away?

“I can tell I’m disappointing you,” my partner will say sometimes. A weekend when she has to work and I was hoping we could do something fun. A movie I want to watch that doesn’t interest her. When she gets angry or upset in a way that makes me uncomfortable. “It’s like you have this idea of how something’s supposed to go,” she says. “Of how other people are supposed to act. And you get irritated if things go a different way.”

So maybe this is really a story about the degree to which our personalities are formed at an early age, how our habits of mind, for better or worse, don’t actually change all that much as we get older. Though I hope that’s not entirely true, because this particular habit of mind is something I’d like to change, or at least tamp down, for both my partner’s sake and my own.